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They are part of a (now) well-known business pattern. Read The Innovator's Dilemma or its follow-up The Innovator's Solution.

I'd never thought of applying the theory to programming languages. But it fits. Some of the pressures documented in The Innovator's Solution to pay close attention to existing customers apply in the case of Perl as well if you interpret them just right. The pricing part is not quite as good a fit, but it is close.

There are different paths to success. Java's path involves having a large marketing machine and significant corporate sponsors. There is no mystery there, but it isn't an example that Perl looks like it will duplicate soon.PHP's success is along a line that is closer to how Perl grew. Historically Perl was the language that people used for small and personal web projects, which sometimes grew up. That's how a lot of Perl projects started, and a lot of Perl people began learning the language. (Including

As an IT manager, you can buy a big huge manly server and hire a man-sized staff of dozens of barely-competent monkeys to write programs in it and look like a big man in front of your other big manly peers.

Me? Alan's just framing what I already know. As far as Perl 6 is concerned it's orthogonal to the problem. If Perl 6 came out tomorrow we'd have the same issues. Double since Perl 6's public perception is so messed up.

Well, I know why Sun lost out. They were overpriced and had poor customer support. I worked at two companies that had the high level support with them, and it was always a pain to get them to actually provide that support (as in, come out and replace the power supplies in my machines like you are supposed to). I liked Solaris well enough, but with Sun's non-technical problems, going with FreeBSD on Dell was just easier to manage because Sun wasn't the bottleneck in support and replacement hardware.I don't t

Perl might have other problems, but Sun wasn't acting like a good vendor to people who really wanted to use them.

But that's exactly Perl's problem. We *think* we know what Perl users want, but we're actually very disconnected from the vast majority of our own users out there, not to mention the folks who aren't Perl programmers but could be.

Backing that one up requires an entire essay that I'm not ready to write at 4am.

Interesting conversation. Regarding Perl not being on anyone's Web 2.0 radar, I could have sworn Yahoo Pipes used Perl heavily. Not sure how popular Pipes is these days but it did create some measure of Web 2.0 buzz when it came out. Odd that it's never mentioned whenever Perl's lack of Web 2.0 presence is brought up.

That's EXACTLY the (a?) problem. Companies don't trumpet "we wrote this new produced in Perl!" Bill Odom laments this all the time. Why is a bit of a chicken/egg problem. They have no incentive to trumpet Perl because Perl isn't sexy and won't win them any points or want great programmers to work for them. This makes Perl even less visible which makes it even less sexy which gives them even less incentive...

Insisting on staying compatible with technology which is simply too old? Maybe the 5.5 compatibility habit was developed when 5.6 came out. Perhaps we should drop 5.5 (and even start sharpening the axe for 5.6) once 5.10 arrives.Perl has *actually* changed in that time. Being compatible means programming with your hands tied behind your back.

And then there's ExtUtils::MakeMaker, which apparently is the favored installer of 99.9% of CPAN users (at least, if you take the default options of CPAN or CPANPLUS

How dare you use a feature as simple and nice as lexical filehandles in a CPAN module, you fascist! It is my right as someone who demonstratably does not upgrade to have the option to upgrade to code written this millennium, you pig!

This woke me up, just as it was nap time.Reading computer language development as an evolutionary issue is interesting.

I think although the analogy of a business (Sun) and a computer language (perl) is an okay, even good, analogy, a business organization has more in common with a biological organism than a language, and a language has more in common with a religion than a business.

Although running a business requires winning hearts and minds and using the language involves programmers tapping at keyboards,

Not to my knowledge. Parrot has a couple of features to bundle up everything into a single PBC file, and it looks like we can avoid having to require everyone to recompile their own bindings to shared libraries, but there's more to distribution and installation than having a single big blob of code.

To go off topic a bit...It hasn't been relicensed yet to my knowledge. They're wibbling about it. [movabletype.org] "Before we released an open source version of Movable Type we wanted to engage with the community regarding its development and scope." What a complete waste of time and energy. What's to talk about, JUST RELEASE IT!

Just you watch, they're going to write their own license. I can smell it.

Let me make some sweeping generalizations...

Commercial software dumped onto the open source world acts very differently

Check out Freebase [freebase.com] and their Metaweb Technology. Watch the first intro movie all the way through.

But OpenGuides has the same publicity issues as the rest of Perl I suppose. A dozen or so people actively work in the community, probably a few hundred more in the world support their local guide. Simply nobody knows about it.

Yep. "How to advertise your web project" is something to be figured out. Here's one way... try searching for it and simil